Just did my own tasting of this tea yesterday and decided to watch your review again today to compare my notes to yours. Here’s what I found:

At first I was surprised by the amount of citrus coming out of the dry leaf. I described these as grapefruit and cranberry notes. I had never smelled a green tea with such prominent citrus notes before, and I thought that maybe the tea had been packaged near an herbal tisane or a blend with dried grapefruit pieces.

After brewing the tea, I began to realize that these might just be the intrinsic characteristics of this tea, because the citrus notes were subdued in a pleasant way in the cup. Aromas like green bean and a faint salty seaweed came out of the wet leaf first, with the citrus aromas lingering in the background.

The tea tasted awesome. A tingle of something like citrus in the beginning, followed by a delicate body with buttercream notes, finishing with a salty seaweed note.

I brewed my tea in a pot and took samples from various lengths of steeping times. Anywhere up to about 7-8 minutes or so didn’t produce any astringency, but after that the tea overbrewed and the astringency steadily increased. Since it resists astringency for so long, this is a good tea for people getting used to green teas (whenever I introduce my friends to green teas, they always tend to oversteep them or use water that is far too hot, and the astringency and bitterness turns them away from green teas).

I’ll do the same experiment with the other Harney teas in the WTR sampler, then get back to you with those notes.

Jeff, have you given this tea a score? After you’ve chronicled several teas, a score can help you go back and compare a tea with one you tasted months or yrs ago. Of course, that’s as long as you remain fairly consistent in assigning scores.